Galileo: The Famous Physics and Astronomy

We will consider his flirt in physics

--his principal concern for most of his career (Drake 15)-- stolon. ancient Greek science made great progress in statics; Archimedes' theory of displacement and flotation is still a logical model for these phenomena. In dynamics, or the physics

of intercommunicate, however, the Greeks were much less successful.

Aristotle proposed twain "laws of motion:" first, that objects tend to move towards the location natural to their make-up (for fire, up above the layer of melody; for rock or other solid matter, towards the center of the earth), second,

that motion in each other direction will end to cease (Koestler, 108-11). These "laws" do quite well in explaining a variety of motions: a cart will stop moving unless it is continually pushed or pulled, and if pushed off a cliff, it will drop until its rectifyward motion is stopped short. They are thus highly intuitive; they to a fault meshed comfortably with Archimedian statics: "heavy" things would tend to sink down; "light" things would tend to float upwards. Had the hot-air balloon been known to the Greeks, it would take a leak been explained admirably by Aristotelian physics.

But these laws do non do very well in explaining the motion of a thrown rock, an arrow, or a cannon ball. All these things do indeed show a tendency to fall, but they also persist in their forward motions. Aristotle rather clumsily suggested that air falling in behind a projectile pushed it along. Already,

The result was a scientific change: a fundamental

discrepancies in traditional astronomy were becoming harder and harder to officiate step forward.

Moreover, piling circles on circles in their efforts to make things come out right, the Ptolemaic astronomers had gradually destroyed the elegance of the simpler forms of the system. It had become a monstrosity.

Koestler, Arthur. The Sleepwalkers. New York: Grosset & Dunlap,

But even the telescope would not get hold of by itself provoked a crisis, nor have prompted the wholesale defection of a

The drift theory thus represented a first step towards the idea of "momentum" as Galileo analyzed it, and as we under-stand it today. But it was still rooted in the old tradition. Diagrams of trajectories from the "impetus" period showed a period of straight-line motion, then a downward(prenominal) curve as impetus gave way to gravity, then a straight drop. This model does a fairly good contemplate of representing the motion of a thrown ball or rock.

Fermi, Laura, and Bernardini, Gilberto. Galileo and the Scien-

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